I kissed her goodbye a thousand times; and yet the gaze still sees her as part of me. It doesn’t matter anymore what I call myself. I can only write. Out of disaffection because what I have right now is responsibility to finish, to think, to answer, to sit with the past always for the present living. It’s hard to endure and sustain labor in dysphoric minutes–eyes twitching, bodies sore, and yet what can I ask more if not forever freedom? Trailing the paving slab, I occasionally kick small stones, falling leaves.
Is this for dissertation? Yes it is. Your next achievement? Not really. It’s just a training result. The game is already played I’m still on the bench. So what do you try? Waiting, maybe I should kill the invisible coach. Isn’t playing on the field a dream of yours? Fancy me, will you, shut the fuck up.
In someone’s dream, a group of mediocre writers grope each other, muddling together like catfishes in an artificial swamp. Mucky, grubby, slimy–they looked cute, smiling in warmth with the sins of permission, faking feelings out of social media camaraderie. Hands on the shoulder, tagging babes, hang out and hang over with words. In my dream, though, I prefer nakedness and brutal orgy: saliva, cum, milk, piss, excrement in strap. And all those moaning scare out birds and folk ghosts. I stop dreaming through the beautiful. Lyricism, I’ll visit it later when they successfully cut my breasts and put those lower chest scars on my skin. I have to have the wounds.
Oh, baby, yes, baby, yeah baby. Let me cry through your camera. My tears cannot fly across the sky but they can swim the seven seas, for my love is big but my nerves are narrow. I have these dangling words around me, and all I can say is groaning and weeping. It’s not alright and let us laugh out loud. Your love is grand that blossoming flowers are ashamed of their wondrous. But baby, baby, I do not desire your majesty. Let’s stay on the grass with me, let the soil and dirt worms eat us alive, let us rot together until dust does us apart.
Is this really about your dissertation? You fucking twat. Such a ghastly pallor you’ve done in this world, that you love books more than people writing them. Have you even mourned for the death you’ve written, for the murder you’ve solved, for the violence you’ve agreed with? You think you’re better than those accomplished writers? I do. I do not. It doesn’t matter. I have anger. And that’s enough. Feeling doesn’t make me right. Feeling doesn’t make me wrong. It is, but not merely. So, I’m asking again, have you grieved?
The contents of my mind are cracks, cryptic amazement, powdery sugary floury sticking on the bottom of a sink, barely sinking. But the voices of people calling my name, “Hey Nik” or the stranger-she who’s smiling at me like I’m the most beautiful boy in the street, charms me. It makes me get up, clean the dusting flour of my mind, move my hands, make delicious cookies you can savour. In-between this space, I accept a string of happiness, of possibility. Read to me your deepest desire and erotic prayer. I welcome your queer.
I wrote my fear on the wall, unsolve it, un-overcome it. I’m trying to stay in bearable discomfort, so one day when the true comfort is mine to embrace, I don’t take it for granted. All those troubles and afraid are no longer under the rug. I exhibit it, hanging them in my room, installing them on my door, so I can always see them, gazing at them, carrying. There will be a time of disappearance, a time when I finally burn the house.
Enough chit-chat. Get things done.
Nik Setiadarma 